“Platonic Word”

Recommended reading: Edward Mendelsonreflects on “how bizarrely Platonic [Microsoft] Word can be” and on writing in WordPerfect, where “the world seems more open, a place where endings can’t be predicted, where freedom might be real.”

"On closer inspection, however, the book comes off as something more complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination. Its elaborate descriptions of pleasure given and taken start to seem like scrims for a moral argument about what sorts of sexual behaviors should be 'forbid' and which should be encouraged—an argument refined in prison by an author deeply occupied with thoughts of punishment, dissipation, and sin." On John Cleland's (very erotic) novelFanny Hill and the importance of its having been written in prison.